Book history is still a relatively new form of interdisciplinary inquiry that
has yet to develop historiographical understandings adequate to the
complexities of the questions it typically seeks to answer.
1
The truth of this
troubling and troublesome assessment is especially evident, I believe, in the
highly ambitious national histories of the book currently in progress. As a
co-editor, with Michael Turner, of The Cambridge History of the Book in
Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830 (hereafter, CHBB5), I have been considering
for several years now the theoretical and practical implications of current
book-historical knowledge about the hand-press period in Britain. I have also
been thinking about how the collective understandings of our intellectual
enterprise as book historians—that is, the historiographies of book history—
affect the ways in which scholars proceed in their investigations. Drawing on
the experience of editing CHBB5 (and, to a lesser degree, of working as co-general
editor, with Henry Woudhuysen, on The Oxford Companion to the
Book, now in progress), I offer some observations on ten salient and various
book-historical topics. Although some of the examples come from a particular
book-history project, I attempt to raise more general concerns of wider applicability
in the hope that presenting this salmagundi of problems and
possibilities will stimulate further reflection and discussion among—and indeed
between—bibliographers and book historians.

The Interdisciplinary Nature of Book History

Writing in 1977, the distinguished Blake scholar Morris Eaves sought to
combat the "parochialism" that characterized the study of publishing history
[End Page 141]
by promoting a "comprehensive view that can see a fact in its context, even
when that context violates the boundaries of specialized areas of knowledge."
2
The difficulties attendant upon such interdisciplinarity notwithstanding,
Eaves advocated a Janus-like program of research, affirming "that historians
of publishing have a right and a duty to set their sights very high, working in
decades to come towards a comprehensive history that looks both inwards
and outwards." We must direct our scholarly attentions "inwards towards a
more precise account of the everyday facts of buyers, sellers, and products"
so that our knowledge of book history is adequately grounded in close investigation
of the historical record. Yet, we also bear a concomitant obligation
to marshal our intellectual energies "outwards towards a more comprehensive
account of publishing in its evolution as part of a large history that
includes all the aspects of culture that affect and are affected by publishing"
(77).

Though highly ambitious, this second aspect of Eaves' twin remit is by
no means eccentric, and has long been considered a basic tenet of book-historical
inquiry. When some of the most consequential scholars pursuing
such studies gathered in June 1980 to produce a "Statement on the History
of the Book," their manifesto acknowledged the difficulty and the centrality
of addressing the impact that books have made on society—and the influence
that society has had on the making of books. "The history of the book is
fundamental to the historical study of society," they declare, "but we are far
from understanding the factors that have shaped the writing and the dissemination
of books." Emphasizing the dynamic and reciprocal relationship
between the book and culture, they insist "These factors have changed over
time and have varied from one cultural area to another; hence the impact of
the book has also been ever-varied and changing."
3

The exigencies of book-historical research accordingly appear to require
a range of specialized knowledge that is genuinely intimidating. "Consider
the demands on the book historian today," Robert Darnton invites us. First,
he or she must command a variety of expertise about the businesses of the
book trade: "know[ing] how to make paper, cast type, impose formes, operate
presses, correct copy, keep accounts, ship freight, place advertisements,
collect bills, satisfy readers and pacify authors." And he or she "must master
the variations of those activities at different stages in the evolution of technology
and business practices." Fair enough. If this were all, if knowledge of
bibliography and the operations of the trades were sufficient, then "the demands
on the book historian today" would be ample, but not excessive. Yet,
Darnton reminds us that, if we are to attend to the larger purview of book
history, then we also "must keep up with the latest varieties of bibliography,
[End Page 142]
library science, literary criticism, sociology, history and economics."
4
The
scope of knowledge required of those who undertake book-historical research
is so broad in part because books "refuse to be contained within the confines
of a single discipline when treated as objects of study. Neither history nor
literature nor economics nor sociology nor bibliography can do justice to all
the aspects of the life of a book." According to Darnton, "By its very nature,
therefore, the history of books must be . . . interdisciplinary in method."
5

Kevin Sharpe recognizes that many scholars "do not always feel at home
with sociologists and Annaliste historians, let alone critical theorists," but
nevertheless also argues that book history must incorporate a variety of disciplines
because "certain types of historical enquiry . . . need to be an interdisciplinary
endeavour."
6
Peter D. McDonald so thoroughly insists on the
interdisciplinarity of book history that he decries attempts to institutionalize
book-historical scholarship into a formalized academic discipline, preferring
instead to emphasize the fluidity of its method: "Bokhistorie er en tverrfaglig
undersøkelsesmodus og ikke en `disiplin', et skjæringspunkt og ikke et sted."
["Book history is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry, not a `discipline', an
intersection not a place."]
7
The consensus among book historians that the
nature of texts and the aims of contemporary scholarly inquiry require more
than a passing knowledge of several academic disciplines does not alter the
fact that most practitioners of book history received their professional training
in one, or at most two, disciplines. Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker
have keenly observed, "The passage of the old bibliography to the new
history of the book is not simple: it is accompanied by an abrupt change
from a reductionist to a maximalist philosophy."
8
Yet, most of us have been
[End Page 143]
prepared—both by our education and by the demands of the profession—
for intellectual undertakings more appropriately described as minimalist.

Although there certainly are notable exceptions, most book-historical
scholarship published since the first issue of Publishing History appeared in
1976 has not been authentically interdisciplinary. In book history, as elsewhere,
interdisciplinarity too often means doing more than one thing inadequately,
the gesture of tacking on a few purloined paragraphs to satisfy a
notional demand, a shallow obeisance to subjects the investigator does not
genuinely know. No wonder that in an important review, "History of the
Book: An Undisciplined Discipline?," Cyndia Clegg appropriately admonishes
us:

to practice interdisciplinary scholarship requires more than becoming conversant in
the recent literature of another discipline; it requires a certain humility in the face
of long traditions of bibliographic, historiographic, and critical practice, and a willingness
to acknowledge and incorporate these precedents along with often unaccustomed
methodologies.
9

"Integration," with its cognate "integrity," should be a principal characteristic
of our interdisciplinary endeavors, informing the answers we provide
and, most importantly. the questions we pose.

The Introduction to the first number of Book History, an annual produced
under the auspices of SHARP, enthusiastically declares that the history
of the book "is a new kind of history," "that book history is information
history," and "that book history provides a more rigorous and empirical
approach to such issues as reader response, canon formation, and the politics
of literary criticism."
10
Although the editors, both accomplished book historians
themselves, promise "new perspectives and innovative methods," they
discuss neither historiography nor any of the analytical, historical, sociological,
or critical methods by which this new kind of historical investigation
might be conducted to produce scholarship of a standard allowing them to
"promise . . . that every issue of this journal will . . . change the way we
read words on paper" (xi). Almost everywhere in this area of scholarly endeavor
there is much Panglossian confidence and little facing up to the stark
realities of how little we know and how much we need to think deeply about
what we are doing.

Periodization

How do the time periods we routinely use to demarcate our book-historical
investigations shape our understandings by opening up certain perspectives
while foreclosing others? The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,[End Page 144]Volume 5 begins with a specific event, the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695,
and ends with the generalized marker of 1830, a date that serves as a terminus
ad quem by which the industrialization of the book is firmly established.
Thus, CHBB5 chronicles the proliferation of print, the rise of what Samuel
Johnson called "the common reader," and the efflorescence of a thoroughgoing
"print culture" in Britain. One practical problem we have encountered
is that very few scholars are comfortable covering the whole period 16951830;
many students of the eighteenth century do not dare to trespass beyond
the French Revolution, or 1800, or the start of George IV's Regency in
1811. Of course, this difficulty obtains in the other direction as well: scholars
of the "Romantic Age" (roughly, 1789-1832) are typically loathe to delve into
the early or mid eighteenth century. Periodization is a practical matter, of
course, but it also profoundly influences how groups of scholars conceptualize
and write about developments in the production, distribution, and reception
of printed matter. Just as the periodization of literary history has had a
thoroughgoing effect on how that subject is researched, taught, studied, and
understood, so too do the ways in which we partition book history, both
national and international, have a significant impact on future patterns of
perception and knowledge.

In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain we have sometimes
selected boundaries based on particularly significant legal developments
(e.g., the granting of the royal charter to the Stationers' Company in 1557
and the lapse of Licensing), sometimes delineated major changes in the conduct
of the book trade (such as the industrialization of book production),
and sometimes chosen temporal limits rooted in a more general heuristic
purpose (e.g., 1400 "when Geoffrey Chaucer died" for the start of Volume 3.
or 2000 for the end of Volume 7 and the History itself).
11
All this seems
straightforward enough. Yet, mindful that the forms our questions take
often dictate the nature of the answers we develop, it may be salutary to
interrogate the matter of periodization in book history, if only as a means
of revealing our tacit assumptions and often-unarticulated biases. Every
period construction necessarily promotes certain kinds of observations while
obscuring others.

One way of thinking about periods might be to give more consideration
to the kinds of books being produced. If, for example, religious and theological
works overwhelmingly constitute the largest category of publishing
activity for the first three centuries of printing, then should ecclesiastical
and theological developments and events not enter more fully into delineating
our concepts of print culture in the hand-press period? Neither Shakespeare
nor Pope, but John Wesley, is the most published individual author
in eighteenth-century Britain, while the best-selling corporate works are, of
course, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.
12
For play texts, it might
[End Page 145]
well make sense to consider the so-called "long Restoration" from the reopening
of the theaters in 1660 to the establishment of stage licensing in
1737. Such a category could help book historians discern more clearly the
complex relationships between dramatic productions of the stage and the
production and publishing of the dramatic page. Practitioners of book history
have often adhered to traditional divisons operative in either literary
or political history because we have inherited these temporal categories as
a consequence of our professional training. Yet, it is by no means clear how
the reign of Queen Victoria—or, as some prefer, the interval from the passage
of the Reform Act (1832) to the accession of Edward VIII (1901)—is
especially meaningful for book history as an investigative tool for framing
our inquiries, however well it may serve as an heuristic expedient.

As we strive to move toward more international histories of the book,
should we use wars, or treaties bearing on trade, or the invention of technologies
to demarcate the field? Employing technological milestones seems especially
appealing, at least for pan-European book history, though such markers
in a global context are of limited utility during most of the history of printing.
For certain kinds of works, thinking about the timeframes of international,
intellectual, or cultural history can help book historians to cross new
boundaries and consider their subjects from a fresh perspective. The notion
of the Romantic century, 1750-1850, for example, could stimulate new
research.
13
Considering the ways that book histories might be most helpfully
partitioned, we may decide that national histories ought to be rich with
"thick description" that attends closely to the significance of local events and
circumstances, while international accounts could reasonably adhere to a
different chronology in seeking to establish a more capacious view.
14

There is a sizeable body of scholarly literature on periodization, but
book historians have generally seemed unconcerned about how the partitioning
of history affects our perceptions and conditions our understandings.1515
One instance of a temporal boundary that has had a profound effect
[End Page 146]
on scholarly research and the structure of our investigations is the decision
to terminate the English Short-Title Catalogue at 1800, thereby forestalling
the possibility of our having a comprehensive bibliography of the hand-press
book in Britain.
16
The consequent lack of bibliographical control for 18011830
vitiates scholars' ability to understand more fully the impact of many
significant developments on the book trade, including: government censorship
of the press as a response to Radicalism; changes in banking and credit
arrangements that fostered the shift from bookselling to publishing; and
technological innovations such as stereotyping, lithography, the advent of
iron presses (Stanhope, Columbian, Albion, etc.), and the mechanization of
paper production. It is a lamentable reality that virtually all the statistical
data presented in CHBB5 necessarily terminates in 1800. The Nineteenth-Century
Short-Title Catalogue, based on radically different principles than
the ESTC, does not pretend to the same inclusiveness and is particularly
weak in provincial printing, which in the decades under discussion accounts
for the production of vast numbers of titles.
17

Boundaries

If temporal borders have a significant impact upon the ways we think about
the histories of printing and publishing, of authorship and reading, then
what other kinds of boundaries might help to construct and circumscribe
our understandings? As editors of CHBB5, we have had to consider a variety
of questions concerning additional boundaries: national, geographical, cultural,
legal, linguistic, and economic. (For disciplinary and temporal thresholds,
see sections 1 and 2 above.) There is a history of the book in Wales;
18[End Page 147]
the four-volume History of the Book in Scotland is in progress,
19
as is a
History of the Irish Book.
20
Nevertheless, the Cambridge series is presumptuously
called The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain.21CHBB5,
to varying degrees, takes cognizance of the book in Wales, Scotland, and
Ireland, although—because of constraints on the size of our printed volume—
nowhere is the attention devoted to these regions as extensive as the editors
desired. In much the same way, CHBB5 includes articles on the British book
in North America and in India, but, as the first volume of A History of the
Book in America, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World tantalizingly
suggests, there is a great deal more that might usefully have been said from
the British perspective about the traffic in books and cultural consumption.
22
Perhaps the most challenging boundaries we as editors have had to negotiate
are those imposed by the limitations of space in a single-volume printed
book (see section 10 below). Robert Darnton has rightly observed that "books
themselves do not respect limits either linguistic or national,"
23
but the
reader of CHBB5 will perceive that our geographical reach has been effectively
constrained by the boundaries of a physical book.

Despite Darnton's assertion in 1982 that "By its very nature . . . the history
of books must be international in scale and interdisciplinary in method,"
most book-historical research in the past twenty-odd years has been genuinely
neither.
24
Writing five years after making his initial declaration, Darnton
acknowledged that "the history of the book . . . faces a danger that has restricted
the development of other disciplines: nationalization," and urged
book historians to "study concrete problems in a comparative manner" that
cuts across the boundaries of the nation-state in order to do justice to an
[End Page 148]
object of study that is "international by nature."
25
Darnton was by no means
the first to affirm that, because books cross borders, book history must do so
as well. The 1980 "Statement on the History of the Book" produced at the
Association of College and Research Libraries' Rare Books and Manuscripts
Preconference observed that "since the book is by its nature a cultural force
that transcends national boundaries, both the design and compilation of
basic tools require international cooperation."
26
The tremendous amount
of scholarship on national histories of the book that has been published, or
is now in progress, may make international book history on a broad scale
genuinely feasible for the first time. When read together, such national histories
will enable more comparative scholarship across traditional boundaries,
a development that bodes well for the future of the field.

National histories of the book will also promote international book
history by underscoring the degree to which the book trade in any individual
country has been allied to the business of books elsewhere. The last
two volumes of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, covering the
years 1830-2000, will be global in their reach, but even earlier volumes in
the series have necessarily emphasized the importance of international commerce
in the conduct of the book trade. From the time that Caxton printed
the first book on English soil in 1477 until the early decades of the eighteenth
century, most of the paper and type used in the manufacture of English books
was imported from the Continent. The experience of Caxton himself, working
as a printer in Cologne and Bruges, reminds us too that book trade
personnel also frequently crossed international boundaries. Of course, part
of the story that CHBB5 has to tell is how England in the eighteenth century
went from being heavily dependent on imported books to developing a thriving
trade in books for foreign and colonial export. When considering the
British book trade, one might also usefully think about the borders and
boundaries—geographical, political, financial, and technological—that obtained
within the country itself, not least the role of London in relation to
the provinces, even after the lapse of Licensing in 1695. For the Renaissance
and eighteenth century, it may be useful when thinking about the provincial
book trade in Britain to apply a modified version of the "internal colony"
paradigm proposed in a different context by Robert Blauner and Michael
Hechter.
27

Still another boundary concerns the kinds of books we study. In book-historical
[End Page 149]
studies of the hand-press period, and in book history more generally,
literary texts have been investigated out of all proportion to their
representation in the marketplace. The program for the Annual Meeting of
SHARP in July 2003 (at Scripps College in Claremont, California) may be
taken as generally representative of the work being done by SHARP members
and may therefore be used as a convenient snapshot of current research
activity among (mostly British and American) practitioners of book history.
The range of topics covered was genuinely impressive; yet, approximately
thirty-seven percent of the papers delivered in the panel sessions were directly
concerned with literary topics: chiefly the publishing or reading of
fiction, poetry, and drama.
28
Given that most scholars conducting book-historical
investigations come from literary studies, this tendency toward
imaginative literature is understandable, but it may reasonably provoke us to
ask, to what extent do `literary' concerns determine the dominant practices in
book history? To what extent is this belletristic emphasis desirable? Book
history is not literary history; literature, as traditionally conceived, constitutes
a relatively small percentage of the books printed in the eighteenth century.
In 1753, for example, literary works in English from all genres comprised
about 11 percent of all surviving published titles. In the same year, books on
religion and theology made up some 21 percent of published works, and
writings on government some 20 percent. Nevertheless, such genres are
seldom the subject of book-historical investigations. Similarly, the deluge of
print necessary for the conduct of business is typically neglected in book-historical
studies.
29
It seems that the reluctance of many book historians to
traverse disciplinary borders by directing their investigations outside the
literary field may in time have a much more far-reaching effect on the practice
of book history than the difficulties presented by the prospect of negotiating
any other boundary.

The Sociology of Texts

As every pioneer well knows, crossing borders and venturing into new territories
can be a difficult and dangerous undertaking. When D. F. McKenzie
delivered the inaugural Panizzi Lectures, "Bibliography and the Sociology
of Texts," in 1985 at the British Library, it was his application of sociology
to bibliography that attracted attention, both pro and con. McKenzie's marshalling
of these conjoined disciplinary perspectives was hardly new, however.
He first used the concept, "the sociology of the text," and began to
[End Page 150]
develop the idea as a component of his revisionist program in the second of
his Sandars Lectures in 1976,
30
making further applications in "Typography
and Meaning: the Case of William Congreve" (delivered in 1977, but not
published until 1981).
31
"Type-Bound Topography" (1982) and his 1983
Presidential Address to the Bibliographical Society both enlarged and
extended his intellectual project well before the Panizzi Lectures were
established.
32

In his first lecture, McKenzie—expert bibliographer, printing historian,
and chronicler of apprentices' entrance into the Stationers' Company—explained
in summary fashion the necessary elements for conducting a sociology
of texts, first by invoking some fundamental principles from Herbert
Spencer's classic work, The Study of Sociology (1873): " `Sociology has to recognize
truths of social development, structure, and function.' "
33
Dilating on
Spencer's text, McKenzie then commented:

As I see it, that stress on structure and function is important. . . . At one level, a
sociology simply reminds us of the full range of social relations which the medium
of print had to serve, from receipt blanks to bibles. But it also directs us to consider
the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their
production, transmission, and consumption. It alerts us to the roles of institutions,
and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and
present. (p. 15)

Although it would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that the marrying
of sociology to bibliography produces the offspring of book history, it is
nevertheless true that an amicable and generative partnership between these
subjects is essential if the nascent interdisciplinary endeavor we call "the
history of the book" is to mature toward its full potential. Because the future
stature of book history depends upon the accommodation—if not the integration—of
these two disciplines in scholarly research, it is deeply worrying
that at present most of us currently undertaking book-historical investigations
are not truly conversant, much less genuinely adept, in either bibliography
or sociology. Believing that such an emphasis is consonant with McKenzie's
[End Page 151]
intentions and achievements, it seems both fitting and constructive to stress
the "and" in the title of the last book he published in his lifetime: Bibliography
and the Sociology of Texts.34

Yet, McKenzie himself never developed the sociological program he inaugurated
with the thoroughness that one might have hoped for, so that
Hugh Amory's critique—" `Sociology', so conceived, has . . . apparently, no
methodological content"—must be accepted as an insightful diagnosis.
35
If
the `sociology' in our evolving understanding of the sociology of texts is to
be more than a generalized marker for vague and uncritically examined
notions of social exchange, then perhaps would-be students of book history
would do well to read Anthony Giddens' New Rules of Sociological Method.
Chapter 4, "The Form of Explanatory Accounts," which, among other matters,
treats "[t]he problem of adequacy," is particularly apposite.
36
Generally
speaking, Giddens proposes a model of sociological analysis that focuses on
"the reproduction of practices." Rejecting the simplistic "dualism of `the individual'
and `society'," he understands social structure as "both constituted
by human agency and yet . . . at the same time the very medium of this constitution"
(128-129). Giddens thus attempts to develop a sociological method
that accounts both for individual human beings as purposive agents and for
the larger forms of social life that their actions reproduce and transform.
37
Giddens' Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) provides an especially
illuminating example of a thoughtfully developed sociological method.
38

The sociology of texts should begin in the study of the practices and institutions
of textual production, transmission, and reception. Such a sociology
perforce involves the investigation of economic determinants, aesthetic conventions,
and ideological factors as it seeks to understand and interpret the
roles of print in the construction and maintenance of social practices and
[End Page 152]
institutions. Books are the products of social processes—sometimes represented
as "the communications circuit" or "the literary field"—and they
participate in social processes far beyond those associated with textual production
and transmission.
39
A sociology of texts should also seek a deeper
understanding of how the practices and institutions of textual production,
transmission, and reception are imbedded in and informed by larger social
and political structures. Moreover, such a sociology must always recognize
that print culture at once instantiates and is instantiated by the larger culture
of which it is a part. Hence, it is sometimes characterized as "an index of
civilisation."
40

Book historians have already begun to cultivate a sociology of knowledge
and its allied discipline, the history of ideas—surely a hopeful development
indicative of greater things to come from recognizing the usefulness of the
social sciences for the investigation and analysis of the worlds of print.
41
Some have found the foundational writings of Karl Mannheim enormously
valuable,
42
as are the works of more contemporary scholars, including Stark,
Berger and Luckman, and Merton.
43
Some important work has been done
[End Page 153]
too in the sociology of literature, though scholarship in this sub-field is
commonly more uneven in quality, which may help to account for its being
generally less well known.
44

The Role of Bibliography in Book History

How can scholars effectively traverse the intellectual divide between bibliography
and book history? What cargoes might be traded between these
territories to the benefit of both? In CHBB5 we have wrestled with questions
about the use and display of bibliographical information of various kinds,
as well as with larger concerns about the relationship between particular
observations and more far-reaching analysis. In any history that gestures
toward comprehensiveness, there is an inevitable tension between the communication
of knowledge and the limited provision of the information from
which it is derived. A still more important matter, however, is the role that
bibliography should play in book-historical research. In a thought-provoking
paper, T. H. Howard-Hill has asked, "What is the contribution of bibliography
to the history of the book?" His answer, in part, is that bibliography
enables "already historically-sensitive book historians to attend to the physiscal
object in history."
45
This understanding accords well with the 1980
"Statement on the History of the Book" in which leading book historians
situated bibliographical scholarship at the center of book-historical research.
"The attempt to understand the influence of changes in book production and
dissemination is particularly demanding," they observed. "In the first place,
one needs to know the basic facts of what was printed, by whom and for
whom," but beyond such fundamental investigations there is also a great
deal of exacting bibliographical work to be done, because "[d]etailed bibliographic
studies, dictionaries of printers, and inventories of both public
and private libraries are among the time-consuming and exacting and fundamental
studies that are needed."
46

Assessing the current state of book history in The Journal of American[End Page 154]History, Joan Shelley Rubin remarks, "Bibliography remains important."
47
David Hall offers a more personal testimony, "My education at the hands of
the bibliographers is ongoing."
48
Nevertheless, the relationship between
bibliography and book history is sometimes characterized by vexing ambiguities
and competing demands. Hall has recorded that at a scholarly meeting
he attended, "The most explicit disagreement concerned texts and their
transmittal: to what extent should historians undertake bibliographical research
before they can proceed in confidence? Meanwhile, it was suggested
that bibliographers put their skills to work answering questions of importance
to historians. . . . This exchange of expectations might not have
satisfied either party. . . ."
49

One problem facing book-historical studies is that many scholars have
an inadequate grounding in bibliography. It seems reasonable to propose
that bibliographical literacy ought to be requisite to book history in the
way that all physicians—whether surgeons, research immunologists, or epidemiologists—have
studied human anatomy. Yet, it remains a disturbing
truth that most of us engaged in book-historical scholarship received no
bibliographical training as part of our graduate studies. The results when
historians of the book are, apparently, ignorant of bibliographical rudiments
can be memorably infelicitous. One celebrated scholar recently made
much ado about the reprinting of a poetic miscellany many years after its
first appearance, adducing from the title page strong evidence of the original
edition's aesthetic and commercial success. Regrettably, however, the "new
edition" was merely a reissue of sheets that had long been in storage. Such
elementary oversights not only bring down individual arguments, they also
potentially compromise the integrity and reputation of book historical research
as a mode of inquiry.

G. Thomas Tanselle, delivering a lecture on "The History of Books as
a Field of Study," observed that "The kind of work now labeled `histoire
du livre' [which Tanselle characterizes as "the study of the role of printed
books in society"] and the kind called `analytical bibliography' [that is, the
scholarly investigation of "the printing history of individual books"] may
be for the most part associated with different groups of people, but both will
be less fruitful than they might be if they develop as independent disciplines."5050
A dialogue between these two areas of inquiry would contribute
[End Page 155]
to book history because the "connection between physical detail [bibliographical
signs] and intellectual content, between analytical bibliography
and textual meaning, has a logical bearing on the role of books in society"
(54, 53).

Tanselle is right to acknowledge that "both will be less fruitful," and so
it is helpful to emphasize that book history might also enrich analytical (and
other varieties of) bibliography as well, since the observation and analysis
of bibliographic codes are always interpretative acts. Like book history,
bibliography—whether descriptive, analytical, enumerative, historical, or
physical—is invariably a critical and critically-laden exercise in historical
interpretation. It is critical in the root-sense of the word: bibliography requires
the repeated exercise of informed judgment. Concomitantly, knowledge
about the production and transmission of individual works (or, in
McKenzie's and McGann's terms, of the particular texts of a work),
51
often
the fundamental stuff of bibliography, can be essential to the conduct of
intellectually rigorous book history. One of the primary lessons at the intersection
of bibliography and book history is that "intellectual content" might
not be so easily equated with "textual meaning" apart from all other bibliographic
codes in the text, because the book is a complex system of signifiers,
all of which contribute to the ways in which meaning is made.
52
In this regard,
the idea of the book as a volume (volumen), a capacious container of
many and varied codes, is particularly appealing.

The rigorous and creative application of bibliographical knowledge to
book-historical research is, in my view, the single most important desideratum
for book history today. It is difficult to imagine how a sociology of texts that
does not integrate the contributions of bibliography could make an important
and lasting contribution to book history.

Understanding What the Gaps in Our Knowledge Might Mean

When in the late 1980s D. F. McKenzie first proposed the idea of undertaking
a multi-volume history of the book in Britain, a number of colleagues wondered
whether the state of our knowledge was as yet sufficiently advanced for
such a project.
53
Some fifteen years later, the question is still highly appropriate.
The lacunae in CHBB5 are far from trivial. They include: the sale of
[End Page 156]
Irish books in Northern England, especially post 1760; the market for Scottish
books in Ireland; the importation of books to the colonies from Scotland,
Northern England, and Ireland; and a range of issues concerning piracy
(discussed in section 7, below). Although some chapters in the volume reflect
outstanding scholarly achievement, others—often of no less merit—indicate
that many more specialist studies are needed. Nevertheless, it is the hope of
the General Editors and of the volume editors that book history will benefit
from the Cambridge History both as a source of knowledge and as a stimulus
to further investigation.

In The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Robert Darnton indicates
that "we need to know more about the world behind the books" and
offers an important series of questions that would help lead book historians
to that knowledge:

How did writers pursue careers in the Republic of Letters? Did their economic and
social condition have much effect on their writing? How did publishers and booksellers
operate? Did their ways of doing business influence the literary fare that
reached their customers? What was that literature? Who were its readers? And how
did they read?
54

Commenting on Darnton's professed ignorance, John Sutherland is regrettably
imperceptive when he claims, "This questionnaire tacitly admits to
vast areas of academic incompetence."
55
Book historians—perhaps more than
researchers in traditional fields or even in longer-established interdisciplinary
approaches—should be mindful of avoiding the "Sutherland syndrome":
a false belief that the admission of ignorance ought automatically be equated
with incompetence. In the case of Darnton, the charge is absurd. The real
danger, however, is that book historians—either suffering from the syndrome,
or fearing the aspersions of those who are afflicted—will themselves be inclined
neither to admit publicly what they do not know, nor distinguish
among the several causes of their nescience.

As I see it, there are three principal classes to consider: 1) errors of perception,
synthesis or analysis, or the failure to adduce what is already known;
in such cases the investigator is ordinarily unaware of his or her ignorance;
2) a lack of knowledge that points toward future research which seems
tractable, but has yet to be undertaken;
56
and 3) ignorance arising from gaps
in the historical record—surviving documentation is so often incomplete and
much that we would be delighted to study is wholly absent. The destruction
of vital Stationers' Company records in "the Blitz" of 1940 is merely a
[End Page 157]
recent instance of such losses attributable to a variety of causes, including:
the Great Fire of London in 1666; the intentional destruction of correspondence
(as when James Dodsley burned the letters of his bookselling
brother, Robert); the use of old business documents as wastepaper for bookbinding;
and the sacrifice of old letters and ledgers as "Martyrs of Pies and
Reliques of the Bum."
57
It does us no good to mourn for all that is lost,
however, any more than it did for Thomasina Coverly to weep for the library
at Alexandria in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.58
Instead, scholars do a service to
their colleagues, present and future, by indicating when their experience
teaches them that particular instances of scholarly ignorance fall into one of
these classes. In A Nation and its Books: A History of the Book in Wales, the
editors Jones and Rees are frank about areas in which "much of the basic
research has yet to be undertaken."
59
Such admissions manifest responsible
scholarship, rather than incompetence. The candid disclosure of what we
do not know, and the careful assessment of the reasons for our incomprehension,
can help direct future investigations and lead us to more adequate
understandings.

The De Facto Culture of Intellectual Property

Scrutinizing the contents of dictionaries, encyclopedias, poetic miscellanies,
magazines, and other works teaches us that, for all the careful tracing of legal
cases that scholars have done, we still know very little about the de facto
culture of "intellectual property" as it has operated in the book trade.
60
Although this regrettable gap in our knowledge obtains not only for the
hand-press period in Britain, but also internationally and during later
periods as well, eighteenth-century England makes a good case in point.
61
Biographical dictionaries and other eighteenth-century works of reference
typically recycled information and sometimes reprinted large passages from
earlier works with little or no alteration—viz., the Biographia Britannica
(1747-66) borrowed extensively from the General Dictionary (1734-41),
and Robert Shiells' Lives of the Poets (1753) used material from both of
[End Page 158]
these—without any known accusations of plagiarism being made.
62
As
Ephraim Chambers stated in the article on "Plagiary" in his Cyclopaedia
(1728):

Dictionary-Writers, at least such as meddle with Arts and Sciences, seem exempted
from the common Laws of Meum and Tuum. . . . Their Works are supposed, in great
Measure, Assemblages of other Peoples, and what they take from Others they do it
avowedly, and in the open Sun . . . and if they rob, they don't do it any otherwise,
than as the Bee does, for the publick Service. Their Occupation is not pillaging, but
collecting Contributions.
63

Even Johnson's highly celebrated Prefaces Biographical and Critical to the
Works of the English Poets (1779-81) is very free in its use of sources—the
great biographer routinely fails to acknowledge evident debts to published
works, especially biographical dictionaries and other works of reference.
64
Johnson's work was, in turn, plagiarized almost immediately.
65

Just as with reference books, so too are many eighteenth-century verse
miscellanies closely related to one or more earlier publications, though the
degree to which `new' miscellanies are indebted to antecedent collections has
not been generally recognized. Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great
Britain and Ireland Re-Published from the Collection of G. Colman and B.
Thornton . . . with Considerable Alterations, Additions, and Improvements
(1785) provides an illustrative example. Chantel Lavoie has revealed that
the anonymous editors of the 1785 text "borrowed heavily [without acknowledgment]
from a four-volume collection compiled by James Harrison and
titled The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties of British Poetry," published
in 1781-82. Moreover, "Harrison had, in turn, borrowed [also without
acknowledgment] older material from the first edition of Poems by Eminent
Ladies (1755) to include in The Lady's Poetical Magazine."
66
Thus, the 178182
collection utilized the 1755 anthology, the 1785 version of which used
material from the 1781-82 volumes. It is plausible that the 1785 compilers
may have elected to remain anonymous because they owned neither the Colman
[End Page 159]
and Thornton text, nor the works they had arrogated from Harrison.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, such cases of unauthorized appropriation
appear to be more the rule than the exception.
67
The same is true
for song books and jest books; even many grammars and other school books,
as well as almanacs—all of which potentially constituted a highly lucrative
market—were regularly plagiarized.

Imaginative works too manifest an attitude toward intertextuality and
literary borrowing that suggests we need to think beyond the body of statutes
and legal cases regarding copyright if we are to develop a more realistic
understanding of how copyright and its attendant notions of intellectual
property actually functioned in the period. The famous diatribe against
plagiarism in Book 5, Chapter 1 of Tristram Shandy—which turns out to
have been plagiarized from Robert Burton, who himself stole passages of his
text from others—is merely one of the more memorable instances of such
borrrowing. Jonathan Swift, who may have inspired Sterne's clever joke, also
mockingly implicated himself as a plagiarist in his Verses on the Death of
Dr. Swift when the persona claims about the Dean, "But what he writ was
all his own" (Poems 493, line 318)—a line stolen almost verbatim from Sir
John Denham's 1667 poem, On Mr. Abraham Cowley (l. 30). More seriously,
Alexander Pope was routinely accused by his rivals and enemies of "plagiary,"6868
often with good cause.
69

Most importantly in this vein, there is a tremendous gap in our knowledge
about piracy—especially in northern England and Scotland, and so-called
"moral piracy" in Ireland.
70
So much basic research is yet to be done
concerning who the pirates were, the extent of their enterprise, the distribution
networks they employed (domestic, foreign, and colonial), and the nature
of their economic impact. The paucity of our knowledge on these fronts effectively
means that there is a significant flaw in our working models of the
ways in which the book trade operated in the British Isles, c. 1750-1830. The
work of other book historians and the nature of piracy itself suggests that the
de facto culture of intellectual property remains an inadequately understood
aspect of book history across most periods and in most places. Although I have
not investigated the matter in detail, it seems that, for eighteenth-century
Britain at least, the gaps in our knowledge come from all three classes of
ignorance: a failure to synthesize what is already known, a promising area of
research that has not been properly investigated, and, inevitably, lacunae in
the surviving historical record, especially with regard to clandestine activities.
[End Page 160]

Some Problems Involved in Reading as a Subject of Book History

The subject of reading presents a number of significant problems for book
historians, perhaps the most obvious among them being controversies over
assessing literacy—do signatures in marriage registers really signify functional
literacy?
71
—and the nature of the so-called "reading revolution."
72
Yet, there is a more fundamental and not wholly insurmountable difficulty in
studying the history of reading. It may well be impossible to write a representative
history of reading based on the experiences of individuals because the
overwhelming majority of reading events are ephemeral and those that are
recorded are necessarily atypical. How can we develop historically sound approaches
to scrutinizing reading practices when most direct evidence of actual
reading is merely anecdotal?

Alastair Fowler approaches the same problem from a slightly different
angle, noting that scholars seeking to establish a history of reading will
"soon encounter an insuperable difficulty: the absence of data." Accordingly,
a line of historical inquiry that depends on the close examination of an individual's
reading practices—what Fowler styles a "minute phenomenology of
reading"—ultimately "depends on a nonexistent history of sensibility and
psychological events" and, hence, "is not very practical." "In the end," he
argues, "the only reader responses we can know in detail are our own." For
Fowler, there is no authentic way to "resolve the impasse of historical
discontinuity."
73

Despite the great enthusiasm among book historians for the study of reading,
Andrew Hadfield, co-editor of A History of the Irish Book, Volume III,
The Irish Book in English 1550-1800 (OUP, 2006), pursues a similar line
of thought, writing of "the sort of problems that plague anyone working in
the now ubiquitous but rather amorphously defined interdisciplinary subject,
[End Page 161]
the `history of the book.' " Above all, he notes the simple truth that
"Evidence left behind by readers is generally scanty, and all too often scholars
are left trying to work out what the reader intended when he or she—if an
identity is known, let alone a date—underlined a particular passage."
74
As
such observations suggest, the value of collecting records of readers' experiences—often
isolated and invariably anomalous—may be rather suspect.
75
It might well be desirable to know what a person read, especially if we can
learn the salient facts of that reader's life (age, gender, occupation, education,
income, social contacts, etc.), but to know how that person read is almost always
historically unrecoverable.

Leah Price also evinces concern about how historians think about reading
practices and the historical evidence they find. "Familiarity makes reading
appear deceptively knowable," she observes. On the one hand, "[t]he most
impassioned reading destroys its own traces" because it goes unrecorded,
while on the other, "studies drawing on autobiography or marginalia alike
are biased toward certain kinds of readers and styles of reading."
76
Even
potentially more comprehensive projects such as the Reading Experience
Database "are inevitably opportunistic in their cherry-picking of decontextualized
`reading experienes' from sources whose own structure and content
differ widely" with the result that historians of reading may be "like magpies"
(313).

These difficulties are of genuine consequence and too often have not been
sufficiently acknowledged. Thus, we may reasonably ask: given the frequently
suspect nature of the evidence and the troublesome ways that book historians
have sometimes used it, how might we conduct research in this important
area with a greater sense of intellectual responsibility? However formidable
the evidential problems we have been considering, the epistemological predicaments
presented by the surviving traces of individual readers' experiences
[End Page 162]
do not mean that we should abandon the history of reading as an area of inquiry.
No less an accompished historian and historiographer than Carlo
Ginzburg has argued for the admissibility of incomplete and even distorted
evidence, provided that the interpreters of such information have a thorough
understanding of its limitations. "Without a thorough analysis of its distortions
(the codes according to which it has been constructed and/or it must
be perceived)," he insists, "a sound historical reconstruction is impossible."
77

In addition, it would seem profitable to develop a history of constructing
and construing meaning not merely from the isolated and evidentially problematic
recorded reactions of readers, but also from bibliography and publishing
history, from the ways in which material forms—bibliographical codes of
many kinds—both effect and affect meanings. The purposive actions of various
agents in the book trade are traceable in tens of thousands of books and
are typically calculated to influence their benign reception in as strong a
manner as possible. Accordingly, we ought to ground our reading and
reception studies more thoroughly in physical bibliography, as well as
in the analysis of book advertisements, reviews, promotional campaigns,
and the like. This is not to say that such studies could be altogether free from
problems of historical interpretation, but at least they would rest on sound
epistemological foundations. Understanding that the book, every book, is an
integrated system of signifiers and that the bibliographical codes embodied in
a particular book most often reflect interpretations and decisions about the
audience, meaning, and cultural significance of that book, some of the most
adept book historians have convincingly delineated the relationships between
forms and meanings. Striving to exhibit the complex relationships
between texts and readers in the production of meaning, Roger Chartier has
demonstrated that "the editorial history of Molièré's comedies has a significant
impact on the reconstruction of contemporary understandings of them,"
and D. F. McKenzie has done much the same for the plays of Congreve.
78
Both scholars employ a synthetic method, embracing "textual criticism, the
history of the book, and cultural sociology" to show how the presentation of
the text is calculated to affect its reception.
79
If the history of reading and reception
[End Page 163]
were more nearly allied to the study of the material book, we might
well find that these areas of inquiry are mutually informing.
80

Moreover, the study of how readers make meanings should not be primarily
confined to scrutinizing individual reader responses. Rather, in keeping
with the need to develop a richer and more complex sociology of texts
(see section 4 above), book historians might profitably focus their efforts on
reading as a social practice that is conditioned by other socially constituted
practices and institutions—just as it, in turn, exercises an influence on them.
Recognizing that even the most solitary reader is, inescapably, engaged in a
culturally situated pursuit, we may perceive that there is a tremendous scholarly
labor to be undertaken in locating reading within the complex forms of
social life that condition this activity at any given moment in history. Accordingly,
we ought to seek a better understanding of how the practices and institutions
of reading and reception are imbedded in and informed by larger
cultural and political structures. So situated in the sociology of texts, the
study of reading holds a scholarly potential commensurate with its difficulty
as an area of investigation.

Numbers

"Follow the money" is an excellent adage for book historians. The production,
distribution, and consumption of texts are almost always co-determined
by commercial and/or economic factors. Whether we are calculating the area
of pastureland needed by a medieval monastery operating a scriptorium in
order to maintain a sufficient number of animals for parchment production
(surplus to requirements for food to feed hungry scribes), or are factoring in
the cost of severance packages when Bertlesmann has acquired a publisher of
scientific journals in North America, we cannot think very far about the
transmission of texts before we bump into matters of money because, invariably,
money matters. Books are business. It seems strange, then, that so few
book historians possess economic knowledge, while the rest of us know almost
nothing about prices, income, capital, markets and consumer behavior, financing,
taxation, money and banking, and other rudiments of elementary
macro- and microeconomics.
81
And who among our number knows very much
[End Page 164]
about the history of accounting or the evolution of business practices in our
respective periods? If commercial motivations dominate the world of print
production and dissemination, then how is it that we so often give them such
scant attention?
82
Perhaps for a start we should all resolve to read G. R.
Hawke's Economics for Historians (1980).
83

In studying a business in which capital outlay was so substantial, credit
was routinely extended to customers for six months or more, return on investment
was slow to accrue, and bankruptcy was common, it is particularly
important to recognize how changes in financing and credit arrangements
fostered or hindered growth. This is especially true if we are to understand
how adjustments in capitalization drove the shift from bookselling to publishing
in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In a similar
vein, we have yet to develop satisfactory accounts of the book trade's behavior
in—and varying responses to—the well-documented fluctuations of national
economics.
84
Although there is a dearth of surviving business and banking
records for the book trade in the long eighteenth century, most of what we
do have has not yet been subject to a thoroughgoing financial analysis. Nor
has much comparative or synthetic work been done either to document the
finances of agents in the trade,
85
or to develop more complete models of how
businesses actually worked.

Most scholars in the humanities, including many book historians, are
virtually innumerate, a liability that affects far more than our general inability
to deal adequately with economics and with business records. Much
book-historical work manifests a statistical innocence that impoverishes otherwise
valuable research. If we are to understand scholarly writings that presuppose
the reader knows the rudiments of statistics, then we need to progress beyond
the definitions of mode, median, and mean.
86
Most of us are not at home
[End Page 165]
with such basic concepts as frequency distributions, categorical independent
variables, or continuous independent variables, much less multiple regression
models. Who among us can interpret a chi-square test, something a first-year
undergraduate biologist or sociologist would be expected to do? Roderick
Floud's An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians should be
required reading.
87
It would also be salutary for more book historians to be
familiar with SPSS, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, the most
commonly utilized computer program for basic statistical analysis.
88
More
advanced scholars examining large bodies of data, such as the ESTC, would
probably benefit from developments in sampling theory, though in such
cases close collaboration with a professional statistician is probably required.
89

One of the chief methodological lacunae in Anglo-American bibliography
and book history also seems to stem, in part, from our discomfort with
numbers. This oversight in need of redress is our failure to interrogate the
bibliographical tools at our disposal—most especially the ESTC—so that we
know their strengths and limitations. Virtually all book historians routinely
employ enumerative bibliographies for their research, but many apparently
give little thought to the details of inclusion criteria, to problems raised by
varying survival rates, or to economic constraints and other important factors
among the circumstances that produced such research resources.
90
A
common scientific adage is: "All measurements are wrong, but some are more
wrong than others. The key is to know how wrong your measurement is."
[End Page 166]
This notion has its corollary in the idea of "tolerance" in engineering.
91
W. W. Greg has calculated that, of the 11,000 works entered in the Stationers'
Register for 1557-71 and 1576-1640, "6,100 are identified as extant, a percentage
of almost 55.5." Reasoning that "there does not appear any very
strong ground for supposing that entrance or non-entrance affected survival,"
he nevertheless concedes: "it is possible . . . that in the field of ephemeral
publications, where survival is least likely, the proportion of copies entered
may have been somewhat lower."
92
D. F. McKenzie's work indicates that what
the Wing Catalogue (1641-1700) includes "may not be as high as even 60 to
70 percent of the titles and editions actually published."
93
In his examination
of survival rates for ABCs, psalters, and primers from the Stationers' stock in
sample years from 1660-1700, John Barnard has documented enormous
losses: although some 14,000 psalters were printed annually, only four copies
are found in Wing. The loss rates for primers is also astonishingly high: for
the 1676-77 fiscal year, "84,000 passed through the Treasurer's hands," yet
they "are represented in Wing by a single 16mo black-letter copy in the
British Library, dated c. 1670."
94

My own calculations for British books in the eighteenth century suggest
that, for approximately ten percent of the titles and editions published, not
a single copy exists.
95
Of course, by definition, none of these lost works or
editions is represented in the ESTC, a fact that surely should have a significant
effect on many of our searches.
96
Because loss rates vary widely according
[End Page 167]
to both format and genre, for certain classes of titles and editions the ESTC
is far off the mark. A great deal more work will need to be done before we
can calibrate the tools we use and, hence, employ them with greater fidelity
to the historical phenomena under investigation.

Producing a Printed History and Considering Its Use and Readership

Both the editors and the chapter authors of CHBB5 have felt enormously
constrained by the limitations imposed on us in trying to create a single-volume
history that satisfactorily chronicles the major developments concerning
the book in Britain and its colonies from 1695 to 1830. Chief among these
constraints has been space: the topic of virtually every chapter in the volume
is deserving of at least one substantial monograph. In a few felicitous intances
we already have genuinely impressive book-length studies to which
readers may be directed. Invariably, however, the question of comprehensiveness
versus depth presents itself. We have tried to address this tension in
part by including case studies and providing tables of data about publications
and book-trade personnel. Nevertheless, it is impossible to satisfy the competing
demands of depth and breadth in a wholly satisfactory fashion.

Closely allied to this issue is the question of what a weighty tome in a
multi-volume national history of the book is for: is it a work of ready reference
or a book to be read at some length? Is its chief purpose to provide information,
or to synthesize vast quantities of information into knowledge?
Working in concert with our contributors, Michael Turner and I have tried
to produce a book that would be both a serviceable work of reference and
an engaging text for more extensive reading. Thorough indexing and cross-referencing
have been paramount in making the volume easily navigable
for the reference-minded reader. Although CHBB5 tells the story of the
efflorescence of print culture in Britain during the end of the hand-press
period and chronicles the shift from bookselling to publishing (with its
attendant technological and financial developments), we have imposed no
orthodoxies, nor prescribed any investigative methods; instead, our hope has
always been that a variety of emphases and approaches would reflect the
diversity of book-historical studies as practiced in our day. Invariably, we
have insisted on scholarly rigor and transparency about what remains unknown,
believing that these best serve our readership and the enterprise of
book history.

It seems inevitable that a book historian should ask: what kind of print
[End Page 168]
product is this and for whom is it intended? Here I must admit to an admixture
of pride and shame: its pitch is authentically scholarly and its price is
genuinely prohibitive, costing c. £110. The first volume of A History of the
Book in America is 662 pages and costs $160 USD; volumes three and four
of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain run to 832 and 920 pages
respectively and are currently priced at the paltry sum of £95.
97
Paradoxically,
then, in Britain and America we have produced national histories of
the book that most book historians cannot afford to own. In contrast, consumers
pay just $50 AUS for the first volume to appear in A History of the
Book in Australia, making the 444-page book well within the reach of both
academics and a popular audience.
98
One way of addressing the problems of
inclusiveness, access, and price is to produce a web-based national history of
the book, which is free to all. Bibliopolis, the electronic national history of
the printed book in the Netherlands from 1460 to the present, offers free
access to a survey of the history of the printed book in the Netherlands (in
158 parts written by 40 book historians); an image database for the Dutch
history of the book ranging from portraits of printers and publishers to
examples of Dutch printing, typefaces, printer's devices, and watermarks;
digitized full texts of the most important book-historical studies; and links
to relevant databases, websites, and electronic catalogues.
99
Managed and
maintained by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, Bibliopolis solves
many of the most pressing problems associated with a printed national history
of the book with sufficient success to make one wonder if books are necessarily
the best medium for publishing national histories of the book.
100

Volume 5 of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain has more
than forty contributors from eight nations writing on topics ranging from
printed ephemera to antiquarian books. If it is a success, then the whole
will be greater than the mere sum of its individual parts. When the fruit of so
much scholarly labor is presented in the aggregate, the reader may reasonably
expect that new patterns and new understandings will emerge. As one
of its co-editors, I hope that it will be a standard work of reference for many
years to come. As a scholar, however, I look forward to the day when book
history will have developed sufficiently to require an altogether new version.
[End Page 169]
If the contemporary, educated reader does not find vexing questions as well
as helpful answers in the pages of CHBB5, and if the discerning book historian
is not led to consider some of the historiographical issues mooted here—to
wonder how our historical inquiries might be conducted differently and
better—then the book will not have fulfilled its promise.

Reflecting on the state of Anglo-American book history and on the ways
in which our investigations might develop even greater rigor, creative vision,
and sophistication, we may feel with a growing sense of distress that there is
a great deal of homework each of us needs to do. It may seem daunting that
the demands of book history appear to require a basic knowledge of so many
disciplines and, ideally, fluency in several. Clearly, no scholar, however talented,
could master all the fields that make essential contributions to book-historical
studies. Perhaps, then, it is best that we perceive book history, not
as a discipline that any one of us can command, but rather as a multidisciplinary
practice that is necessarily collaborative. In his seminal essay of 1982,
"What Is the History of Books?," Robert Darnton called attention to the new
coordination of activities among an international group of "historians, literary
scholars, sociologists [and] librarians."
101
The promise of that statement
has yet to be fulfilled, but the need for such collaboration—for a catholic, capacious
approach to our undertaking, for promoting a more communitarian
scholarly sensibility and practice—is surely vital. Book history is an interdisciplinary
endeavor that scholars may creatively undertake together.

One vital aspect of such a collegial enterprise concerns our roles as educators
in the academy. Because the scholar-teacher is perforce always a student as
well, we must instruct and learn from each other, especially as book history
continues to develop apace. At the same time, we bear a delightful responsibility
for educating our students to surpass us. Accordingly, this medley of observations
and reflections from a student of book history with much to learn is
tendered, not as a counsel of despair, but in the hope that it might help to
invigorate the cluster of interdisciplinary practices we call the history of
the book.

Footnotes

*. The author wishes to acknowledge the kindness of John Barnard, Tom Bonnell,
Rebecca Stark-Gendrano, Lesley J. Higgins, Peter D. McDonald, Tore Rem, and Shef Rogers,
who generously read a draft of this essay and offered valuable suggestions. Parts of this
work have been presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the Society for the History of
Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) and the 2005 annual meeting of the
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS); thanks go to my colleagues for
their comments. I am especially grateful to the American Council of Learned Societies for
a research fellowship that gave me the time to write this piece when I was supposed to be
working on something else.

1. The word "historiography" is here predicated to mean: the principles, theories, or
methodologies of scholarly historical research and writing. In other words, what we as
researchers of book-historical matters think we are doing and why.

5. Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?," in his The Kiss of Lamourette
(London: Faber and Faber, 1990), pp. 107-135 [p. 135]; originally in Daedalus 111 (Summer
1982), 65-83. Cf. Joan Shelley Rubin's reflections on book history from a more recent and
chiefly American context, "What Is the History of the History of Books?," The Journal of
American History 90.2 (Sept. 2003), 555-575.

6. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England
(New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), p. 39. On the contributions of the
Annaliste school to book history, see Wallace Kirsop, "Literary History and Book Trade
History: The Lesson of L'Apparition du livre," Australian Journal of French Studies 16
(1979), 488-535.

8. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, "A New Model for the Study of the Book," in
A Potencie of Life: Books in Society, The Clark Lectures, 1986-1987, ed. Nicolas Barker
(1993; repr. London: British Library, 2001), pp. 5-43 [p. 39]. Cf. the home page for The
Centre for the History of the Book, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The
University of Edinburgh, "BOOK HISTORY is an area of interdisciplinary enquiry, drawing on
the methods of Bibliography, Social History, Literary Criticism, and Cultural Theory. Its
specific objects of study include literacy and reading practices, relations among publishers,
authors, and readers, and media production technology." <http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/chb/>; consulted 15 April 2004.

14. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture,"
in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3-30. As Geertz
attests [p. 6], the concept originates in the work of Gilbert Ryle. See also Geertz, Local
Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

15. Among the most useful studies are: Ralph Cohen, ed., "A Symposium on Periods,"
New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 1 (1970), 113-334; Asbjørn
Aarseth, "Literary Periods and the Hermeneutics of History," in Mario J. Valdés, ed.,
Toward a Theory of Comparative Literature: Selected Papers Presented in the Division of
Theory of Literature at the XIth International Comparative Literature Congress (New
York: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. 229-236; Robert Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of
Literary History," Colloquium Helvéticum: Cahiers Suisses de Litterature Comparee/
Schweizer Hefte fur Allgemeine und Vergleichende Liter 22 (1995), 117-136; Lawrence
Besserman, ed., The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New
York: Garland, 1996); David Stewart, "Historicism and Questions of History, Ideology, and
Periodization," Southern Humanities Review 30 (1996), 309-326; A Special Issue on Periodization,
Robert S. Baker, intro., CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy
of History 26 (1997), 135-141; Marshall Brown, ed. and intro., "Periodization: Cutting up
the Past," A Special Issue of Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 62
(2001), 309-474; Joan DeJean, "Was the Eighteenth Century Long Only in England?"
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13 (2001), 155-162; Robert J. Griffin, "The Age of `The Age of'
Is Over: Johnson and New Versions of the Late Eighteenth Century," Modern Language
Quarterly 62 (2001), 377-391; James A. Parr, "A Modest Proposal: That We Use Alternatives
to Borrowing (Renaissance, Baroque, Golden Age) and Leveling (Early Modern) in Periodization,"
Hispania: A Journal Devoted to the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese 84
(2001), 406-416; Jean Rohou, "La Périodisation: Une Reconstruction révélatrice et explicatrice,"
Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France 102 (2002), 707-732.

16. For an illuminating collection of essays on the history, development, and use of the
ESTC, see Henry L. Snyder and Michael S. Smith, eds., The English Short-Title Catalogue:
Past, Present, Future (New York: AMS Press, 2003).

17. Our best estimate of publishing activity 1801-1830 is found in Simon Eliot, Some
Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800-1919, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical
Society, Number 8 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1994). Cf. Simon Eliot, "Very
Necessary but Not Quite Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book
History," Book History 5 (2002), 283-293.

18. Philip Henry Jones and Eiluned Rees, eds., A Nation and its Books: A History of
the Book in Wales (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1998).

19. Bill Bell and Jonquil Bevan, gen. eds., A History of the Book in Scotland, 4 vols.
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, in progress). The volumes are divided as follows: 1.
Origins to 1707; 2. 1707-1800; 3. 1800-1880; 4. 1880-1980.

20. Brian Walker and Robert Welch, gen. eds., A History of the Irish Book, 5 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, in progress). Volumes 3-5 cover "The Irish Book in English"
and span the periods 1550-1800, 1800-1900, and 1900-2000.

21. For the record, it should be noted that the general and volume editors wanted the
indefinite article—A History of the Book—but the Press insisted that it be The History.

22. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, Volume 1,
The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

24. Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?," p. 135. For a useful survey of book-historical
scholarship to 1997, see Jonathan Rose, "The History of Books: Revised and
Enlarged," in The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, ed.
Hayden T. Mason (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), pp. 83-104. See also Ian R. Willison,
"Remarks on the History of the Book in Britain as a Field of Study within the Humanities,
With a Synopsis and Select List of Current Literature," in Essays in Honor of William B.
Todd, comp. Warner Barnes and Larry Carver, ed. Dave Oliphant (Austin, TX: Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin, 1991), pp. 95-145; also
issued as Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 21.3/4 (1991), 95-145. See
also Willison, "The Role of the History of the Book in the Humanities," in Zukunftsaspekte
der Geisteswissenschaften: Vier Vorträge, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Hildesheim and New York:
Olms-Weidmann, 1996), pp. 93-120.

26. Carpenter, ed., Books and Society in History, p. xi. The development of the English
Short-Title Catalogue has been an outstanding instance of such international collaboration.
See Snyder and Smith, eds., The English Short-Title Catalogue: Past, Present, Future,
especially pp. 3-18, 45-63, and 105-154.

29. See John J. McCusker, "The Business Press in England Before 1775," Essays in the
Economic History of the Atlantic World (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp.
145-176; and McCusker, European Bills of Entry and Marine Lists: Early Commercial Publications
and the Origins of the Business Press (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985).
Cf. McCusker and Cora Gravestijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism:
The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of
Early Modern Europe, Netherlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief, ser. III, no. 11
(Amsterdam: Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief, 1991).

30. "The London Book Trade in the Later Seventeenth Century." Unpublished typescript
of the Sandars Lectures for 1975-76. Distributed privately; copies deposited in the
British Library; the English Faculty Library, Oxford; and the University Library, Cambridge.

32. "Type-Bound Topography," Times Literary Supplement (17 December 1982), 1403;
"The Sociology of the Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand," Library
6th ser. 6 (1984), 333-365. A revised version was published as Oral Culture, Literacy & Print
in Early New Zealand: The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Victoria Univ. Press, 1985).

37. For critiques of Giddens' method, see Nicos P. Mouzelis, Back to Sociological Theory:
The Construction of Social Orders (London: Macmillan, 1991), a stimulating work in its
own right; and Hans Harbers and Gerard de Vries, "Empirical Consequences of the `Double
Hermeneutic'," Social Epistemology 7 (1993), 183-193 (with comments and replies, 193-211).
More generally, see David Held and John B. Thompson, eds., Social Theory of Modern
Societies: Anthony Giddens and his Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).

38. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction
in Social Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1979). For a bibliography of works on Giddens'
theories and of studies that use them, see Christopher G. A. Bryant and David Jary, The
Contemporary Giddens (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 287-320.

39. For the "communications circuit" in various manifestations, see Darnton, "What
Is the History of Books?," pp. 107-135; Darnton, "Histoire du livre, Geschichte des Buchwesens,"
pp. 33-41; and Adams and Barker, "A New Model for the Study of the Book,"
pp. 5-43. On the "literary field" see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production:
Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993).
For a productive synthesis involving both of these constructs, see Peter D. McDonald, "Implicit
Structures and Explicit Interactions: Pierre Bourdieu and the History of the Book,"
Library 6th ser. 19 (1997), 105-121. Cf. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art, 2nd ed.
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 26-48.

40. Keith Maslen, "Jobbing Printing and the Bibliographer: New Evidence from the
Bowyer Ledgers," Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin 10 (1977),
4-16 [p. 16]; repr. in Maslen, An Early London Printing House at Work: Studies in the
Bowyer Ledgers (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 139-152 [p. 152]. For
a critique of the concept of print culture, see the first chapter of Joseph A. Dane, The
Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2003).

41. Among the seminal Anglo-American studies are: Hajo Holborn, "The History of
Ideas," American Historical Review 73 (1968), 683-695; Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and
Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969), 1-53; and Hayden
White, "The Tasks of Intellectual History," The Monist 53 (1969), 606-630. See also Dominick
LaCapra and Stephen L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals
and New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982).

43. See Werner Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge: An Essay in Aid of a Deeper Understanding
of the History of Ideas (1958; repr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1998);
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Harmondsworth:
Penguin. 1967); and Robert K. Merton, "The Sociology of Knowledge," in his
Social Theory and Social Structure, pp. 510-542. James E. Curtis and John W. Petras,
eds., The Sociology of Knowledge: A Reader (London: Duckworth & Co., 1970), is a useful
sourcebook.

44. Readers may also wish to consult Robert Escarpit, Sociology of Literature, trans.
Ernest Pick, 2nd ed. (1958; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1971); Janet Wolff, Hermeneutic
Philosophy and the Sociology of Art: An Approach to Some of the Epistemological Problems
of the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Art and Literature (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1975); Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy Griswold,
eds., "The Sociology of Literature," a special number of Critical Inquiry 14 (1988), 421-589;
and Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art. See also James McLaverty, "The Mode
of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum," Studies
in Bibliography 37 (1984), 82-105.

45. T. H. Howard-Hill, "Bibliography and the History of the Book," typescript of an
as-yet-unpublished plenary lecture delivered at the annual meeting of SHARP, University
of London, July 2002.

48. David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, MA:
Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 8.

49. David D. Hall, "A Report on the 1984 Conference on Needs and Opportunities in
the History of the Book in American Culture," in Needs and Opportunities in the History
of the Book: America, 1639-1876, ed. David D. Hall and John B. Hench (Worcester: American
Antiquarian Society, 1987), p. 11.

50. G. Thomas Tanselle, "The History of Books as a Field of Study," The Second Hanes
Lecture, presented April 15, 1981 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in
Tanselle, Literature and Artifacts (Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the Univ.
of Virginia, 1998), 41-55 [pp. 48-49].

52. See McGann, The Textual Condition, where he argues that a text is best understood
as "a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes" (13). Cf. McKenzie,
"Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve."

53. Cf. Penny Griffith, Ross Harvey, and Keith Maslen, eds., Book and Print in New
Zealand: A Guide to Print Culture in Aotearoa (Wellington: Victoria Univ. Press, 1997): "A
major history is some years away. Such a work of synthesis must be based on a sufficient
foundation of systematic research, and this foundation has yet to be laid" (p. 13).

56. In the machine press period, some highly desirable research projects—a nineteenth-century
enumerative bibliography created to the same standards as the ESTC, for example—
have been considered impracticable because of the surfeit of information to be treated in
the hundreds of thousands of books that survive.

59. Jones and Rees, ed., A Nation and its Books: A History of the Book in Wales, p. xiii.

60. Paulina Kewes, ed., Plagiarism in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2003) provides useful essays on the evolution of ideas about intellectual property
and its theft. Among the general works on this topic are: Alexander Lindley, Plagiarism and
Originality (New York: Harper, [1952]); Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: Forays into the
Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (1989; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 1991); and Neal
Bowers, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist (New York and London: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1997).

61. Helpful guides to the history of intellectual property in eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Britain are Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright
(Cambridge, MA; Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), and John Feather, Publishing, Piracy and
Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain (London: Continuum, 1995). See also
Brean S. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 19-46.

62. See Isabel Rivers, "Biographical Dictionaries and their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers,"
in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays
(London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 135-169, which suggests the degree to which new dictionaries
were indebted to their predecessors.

64. See the editor's "Introduction" to and the treatment of "Sources" for each biography
in Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).

65. Thomas F. Bonnell, "Patchwork and Piracy: John Bell's `Connected System of
Biography' and the Use of Johnson's Prefaces," Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995), 193-228.

66. Chantel Lavoie, "Poems by Eminent Ladies: A Study of an Eighteenth-Century
Anthology," unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Toronto, 1999, 279. Lavoie's argument is
convincing; in addition to comparing the contents of the collections, she demonstrates that
the error of not knowing that Miss Whately and Mrs. Darwall are the same person is
common to both the 1781-82 and the 1785 anthologies.

67. For an extended treatment of this topic, see Michael F. Suarez, S.J., "The Production
and Consumption of the Eighteenth-Century Poetic Miscellany," in Rivers, ed., Books
and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, pp. 217-251.

70. One hopes that a book-length study of piracy by Adrian Johns, now in progress,
will provide some redress.

71. For a useful survey of relevant studies on literacy in the eighteenth century, see
Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1987), pp.
230-248, 313-340. David Cressy's Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in
Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980) is a fine guide to
earlier periods, while W. B. Stevens, Education, Literacy, and Society, 1830-70: The
Geography of Diversity in Provincial England (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1987)
serves well for the years following the long eighteenth century.

72. On the "reading revolution" see Rolf Engelsing, "Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte
in der Nauzeit: Das statistische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre,"
Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 10 (1969), cols. 944-1002; and Engelsing's Der Bürger
als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500-1800 (Stuttgart, 1971). Engelsing's work has
been questioned by a number of prominent scholars: Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to
Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensibility," in his The Great Cat Massacre and
Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Allen Lane, 1984), pp. 215-256 [pp.
219-251]; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Use of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia
G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 222, 224-225, 231-233; Robert
Darnton, "First Steps toward a History of Reading," in his The Kiss of Lamourette, 154-187
[pp. 165-166]; and John Brewer, "Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and
Strategies in Anna Larpent's Reading," in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor,
eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 226-245 [pp. 243-244].

75. A recent example of such collecting is Stephen Colclough, Reading Experience
1700-1840: An Annotated Register of Sources for the History of Reading in the British Isles,
History of the Book on Demand Series, 6 (Reading: Simon Eliot, 2000). See also the Open
University/British Library project, The Reading Experience Database, the aim of which
is to collect the historical evidence for reading in the British Isles 1450-1914: <http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/>. An elementary knowledge of statistics and of basic sampling
theory indicates a further epistemological problem with such projects—when we consider
the vast number of unrecorded instances of reading, the number of surviving recorded reading
events must perforce be statistically insignificant because the sample size represents far
too small a proportion of the whole.

76. Leah Price, "Reading: The State of the Discipline," Book History 7 (2004), 303-320
[p. 312]. Price's valuable survey provides an excellent introduction to this area of inquiry
and to many of the most important studies on reading published in the past 25 years. See
also Roger Chartier, "Histoire de la lecture: selection bibliographique," In Octavo (Spring
1993), Supplement.

77. Carlo Ginzburg, "Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian," in Questions
of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler,
Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994),
pp. 290-303 [p. 295]; reprinted from Critical Inquiry 18 (Autumn 1991), 79-92. See also
Ginzburg's discussion of distorted evidence, "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist," in his
Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 156-164 [pp. 158-159]; and his complementary essay,
"Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," in the same volume, pp. 96-125.

78. Roger Chartier, "Texts, Printing, Readings," in The New Cultural History, ed.
Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), pp. 154-175 [p. 162]; and McKenzie,
"Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve." See also Chartier, The Order
of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994 [originally
published in French, 1992]), especially pp. vii-xi and 1-23.

80. Cf. Kevin Sharpe's expression of concern in Reading Revolutions: The Politics of
Reading in Early Modern England at the failure of book historians "to incorporate reception
theory into a historical and material study of books and their readers" (p. 39). On the
study of reception, see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy
Bahti (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), especially pp. 3-75.

81. One way to begin developing a sufficient understanding of book-trade economics is
to gain a deeper sense of the value of money and, hence, of the prices being charged—see
John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Commodity Price
Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States, 2nd ed.
(Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2001). Historians of the book in Britain
will find McCusker's on-line calculator useful for converting an historical sum in pounds, shillings,
and pence into today's money: <http://www.eh.net/ehresources/howmuch/poundq.php>. There is also a calculator for converting historical U.S. dollars into current money.

82. Of course, there are notable exceptions; see, for example, James Raven, "The Book
as a Commodity," in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830,
ed. Michael F. Suarez, S.J., and Michael Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007),
chap. 3; Raven's forthcoming history of the English book trade, 1450-1900 (2007); and
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2004). Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History
of the Encyclopédie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979) is exemplary in this
regard.

84. For a noteworthy exception, see John Bidwell, "American Papermakers and the
Panic of 1819," in Barker, ed., A Potencie of Life, pp. 89-112; see also J. J. Barnes, "Depression
and Innovation in the British and American Book Trade, 1819-1939," in Carpenter,
ed., Books and Society in History, pp. 231-248. A useful guide for an especially significant
period is R. C. O. Matthews, "The Trade Cycle in Britain, 1790-1850," in Derek H. Aldcroft
and Peter Fearon, eds., British Economic Fluctuations 1790-1939 (London: Macmillan,
1972), pp. 97-139.

86. Hugh Amory, "A Note on Statistics," in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World,
504-518, is right to caution, "precision should not be mistaken for accuracy" (p. 515), but it
is nevertheless disconcerting that the only treatments of the data presented are simple percentages
and moving averages. More dismaying still is the fact that none of the evidence he
offers has been statistically tested to gauge its reliability.

90. We may recognize a closely related case in the ways that bibliographers and book
historians have routinely used book auction catalogues for provenance information, even
though the commercial circumstances of their production most often makes them unreliable
sources; see Michael F. Suarez, S.J., "English Book Sale Catalogues as Bibliographical
Evidence: Methodological Considerations Illustrated by a Case Study in the Provenance and
Distribution of Dodsley's Collection of Poems, 1750-1795," Library 6th ser. 21 (1999), 321360.

95. See Suarez, "The Quantity and Nature of Printed Matter: A Bibliometric Analysis
in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830, ed. Michael F.
Suarez, S.J., and Michael Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), chap. 1. Survival
rates are highly variable, depending on format and genre, among other factors. An
overall figure of c. 90% of editions having at least one extant copy is an estimate based on
comparing titles and editions from eighteenth-century printers' ledgers and book reviews
with entries in the ESTC. Less than one percent of eighteenth-century jobbing printing
survives, though such ephemeral publications were the overwhelming majority of presswork—both
in terms of sheets printed and of items produced—and the financial lifeblood
of most firms, especially in the provinces; see Keith Maslen, "Jobbing Printing and the
Bibliographer," cited in n. 40 above.

96. One problem of information retrieval is that the user may easily detect the irrelevance
of some of the "hits" that result from a search, but most often has no way of knowing
what potentially relevant data is missing. In information science this is "the recall problem,"
where recall is "the proportion of relevant information that was retrieved." C. N. Ball,
"Automated Text Analysis: Cautionary Tales," Literary and Linguistic Computing 9 (1994),
295-302 [p. 295]. See also D. Blair and E. Maron, "An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness
for a Full-Text Document Retrieval System," Communications of the ACM 28 (1985), 298299,
who note that users were confident in the system even when less than 50% of relevant
information was retrieved (cited in Ball, 295-296).

97. Amory and Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, Volume 1, The Colonial
Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999); Hellinga and
Trapp, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 3, 1400-1557 (1999);
John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, eds., assisted by Maureen Bell, The Cambridge History
of the Book in Britain, Volume 4, 1557-1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002).

98. Martyn Lyons and John Arnold, eds., A History of the Book in Australia, 1891-1945:
A National Culture in a Colonised Market (St. Lucia: Univ. of Queensland Press, 2001).

100. Of course, such a non-commercial project requires a great deal of funding and institutional
support. In addition to the Royal Library, Bibliopolis is supported by the universities
of Amsterdam, Leiden, Nijmegen, and Utrecht, and the Nederlandse Boekhistorische
Vereniging. One advantage of the web-based project is that it can be updated and
expanded over time. It seems reasonable to hope that, in addition to its encyclopaedic
entries, Bibliopolis will present more detailed and discursive studies as well.